Sydney Carton Is Not Dead
by Tierfal
Summary: An alternate ending to A Tale of Two Cities, beginning with an unlikely bit of Deus Ex Machina on the behalf of Mr. Sydney Carton. Written in my best imitation of Dickens.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter I – The Resurrection and the Life

'_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.'_

Sydney Carton raised his right foot and placed it on the first of the wooden stairs. It was a foot that belonged to him, but yet one imbued with a disconcerting kind of unfamiliarity by Darnay's boot on it, a boot that he had pried from the man's foot himself to complete his feeble and almost unnecessary disguise.

These people wanted blood. Whose hardly seemed consequential; if they had known, somehow, that he had replaced Charles St. Evrémonde, called Darnay, it hardly would have dulled the hungry eyes, stayed the hands clenched tightly around the hilts of knives and the butts of pistols, slowed the ceaseless fingers of the women knitting, knitting, knitting before the revered construction that he climbed.

He lifted his left foot to the next step. _'I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord…'_ The epitaph of his father's grave ran though his mind, faster and faster, galloping, unstoppable, rising in his throat, pleading to be shouted to the rolling, roiling crowd as one final defiance.

He placed his right foot on the next step and focused his desperate, skittering thoughts on her—on a sweet, gentle young woman, on the way that sunlight filtered through the leaves of the plane-tree in the yard and glinted gold on the rippling curls of her light hair, on the bewilderment and the hopeless dismay, and, as the grandest tribute to her dear and generous nature, the persisting affection in her bright blue eyes when she looked at him. A lock of dark hair slipped free of the ribbon that held it back, a red ribbon, red like the endless sea of caps in the multitude before him and like the surging life of the twenty-two victims just today of the National Razor, La Guillotine.

Sydney Carton lifted his head. The last two steps passed under the boots that were not his; an attendant at either side placed a hand on the shoulder of a coat that was not his; they pushed him forward, and the crowd roared at a man that was not him. They forced him down, pressed his neck hard against the curving wood, still wet from the thin blood of the pale, shaking young seamstress who had strengthened him by asking him for strength, but he could not bring himself to resent them. France would heal. Lucie was safe. Charles Darnay was on his way to England. He had kept his pledge to Lucie, that he would give anything in his power to preserve those that she held dear, and his promise to little Lucie, who doted on him like an uncle, whose hair like her mother's had brushed his face when she had kissed his cheek and asked him to try to help her father. They would go back to their house, the house with the plane-tree, and there they would stay, there they would live out their days in quiet and in warmth, and that, just that, was enough.

'I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.' 

Sydney Carton closed his eyes. That was enough. _It is a far, far better thing that I do,_ he thought, _than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known._

The cries of the crowd soared to a howling crescendo; fragments of triumphant French assaulted his ears; but it was enough.

Then there was a hushed silence, a cowed silence, an astonished and a perplexed silence, and Sydney Carton opened his eyes. The awed gaze of the wild crowd was as one set of eyes directed just above him at the blade that had begun to fall and never finished.

A murmur swept through the crowd, one that began to rise, one that would reach a climax in a call for blood, in a denial of the fluke, in harsh disagreement with the choice of their beloved lady, La Guillotine. Her sympathies would not be welcome; not for Evrémonde, called Darnay.

Carton looked down at the knitting women not even a metre from this perverted stage, women flecked with blood, women who could not have washed themselves clean of it had they tried. They called to each other, called to the people around them, pointed crooked fingers at the man they thought was Evrémonde and protested this cruel caprice of the dear Guillotine, a whim that stole from them, from France, the head of a Marquis to add to their pyramid of them, the crowning piece. This injustice could not stand. Evrémonde, called Darnay, was to fall with the others.

While the murmurs were still murmurs, while the disbelief still subdued the swelling, shifting crowd, a girl leapt up onto the platform next to La Guillotine, a girl whose dark hair poured out from under her red cap and in whose slender fingers there rested a long knife yet untainted by the blood of other Frenchmen.

'The Goddess of Liberty loves this man!' she cried over the building roar of the masses. 'She has spared this man, don't you see? She has chosen him for her own! Let him be free!'

Before Carton could think—and what would he have thought if he could, but that perhaps _La Liberté_ had indeed chosen him to be spared—he was hoisted to his feet, and the girl pulled him down the creaking stairs, through the assembly of the next twenty-nine customers to La Guillotine, their eyes following him slowly and carefully as if he were a man dead even now, through the reaching arms of the gaolers of the Concierge, just too short or too feeble to grasp Darnay's coat or Darnay's cravat and stop him, through the confounded ranks of the populace gathered here, too amazed at the miracle of his escape to halt it, their weapons at their sides, their incredulity brighter on their faces than carnival masks. Four tall, broad-shouldered men fell in next to the girl, surrounding him, and as she released his arm, his wrists yet bound, two of them linked elbows with him, as if old acquaintances that he had since forgotten, and heaved him over the last stretch to the streets beyond.

The girl pulled the ribbon out of his hair, stripped the cravat from around his neck with one quick jerk of her wrist, and sliced through the rope at his own. A question formed at his lips as she tossed the discarded articles to the muddy ground and one of the men trod on them deliberately, but the girl smiled, almost wearily, removed her red cap, and spoke before he could.

'Someone up there' –she nodded to the sky– 'likes you very much, Monsieur Evrémonde.'


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter II – Saints

Sydney Carton found himself catching a glimpse of his own reflection in a wide shop window divided into a dozen square panels. He saw a man who looked very bewildered and, compared to the four great, hulking young men ushering him along, very small, and then the girl lifted a key hanging on a piece of string from where it rested around her neck and pulled it over her head. She opened the door just to the left of the window, guided him in, bid the four young men to 'try to save some more,' closed the door, locked it securely with the key, and replaced the key around her neck.

Carton turned and cast an eye over the room. The sparing sunlight that managed to penetrate the dusty glass of the window dimly illuminated a room that seemed to serve a vast variety of disparate purposes and that appeared to hold a vast variety of disparate things. A table stood there, to his right; a pile of rumpled blankets on what looked to be a bed, there, against the wall opposite the door; a threaded standing loom, there, by the hearth, faced away from the window; finished fabrics, rough in texture but meticulously neat, hanging on the far wall and lying draped over a desk and the open door of an armoire, there, to his right; and chairs, and planks of wood, and other oddities were strewn about altogether haphazardly, all across the floor. Past the bed he saw a door, and through the door he saw the telltale gleam through grime of the dishes stacked on a wooden table within, indicating that a kitchen lay beyond.

Abruptly Carton noticed the girl again as she started across the room and began to search through a drawer in the towering armoire, and for the first time, he looked at her closely, wanting to learn the face of his savior. The girl paused and straightened to look back at him; her dark eyes were discerning, and set in a face with a slightly pointed chin like a mountain peak thrusting down towards her faded gray-blue dress. She was not remarkably pretty, but neither was she remarkably not; it seemed that she was not remarkably anything. Hers was a face that would be passed over in a crowd, which Carton thought was probably to her advantage if she intended to stand in Paris in the middle of a revolution and attempt to snatch French aristocrats from under the very blade of the Guillotine. It was also a face thinned by years of making a day's bread last many days, one haunted in the shadows by the indelible sight of streets running red with blood.

'Might I have a name?' he inquired.

The girl made a quick curtsey, even here, even now, in deference to the man that she thought was a French marquis. 'My name is Marie Saint-Clare,' she told him. 'Not such a good name, Monsieur Evrémonde, now, when the only God is _La Revolution_, and His only prophet is _La Guillotine_. I have four brothers, whom you have met; I shall not burden your memory with their names at this moment, Monsieur; know only that this shop was abandoned when the landlord cried for too much, and then that the landlord was silenced forever for crying against France. My brothers and I needed a place to sleep, and it suffices. I hope it will suffice for you as well until we can return you to England.'

'How…' Carton began, almost hopelessly. He didn't know what he had intended to say, or what he intended to say ever again. He had left part of himself on the guillotine's fateful platform, a part of himself much more coherent and much cleverer than what remained here, standing dumbly in the center of a French peasant girl's meagre lodging.

Marie Saint-Clare gave him sufficient time to finish his fragment of a query; when he failed to do so, with his eyes imploring her to guide him with the words that flowed so easily from her lips, she obliged.

'I attended your trial, Monsieur Evrémonde,' she divulged. 'We hope to bring you back to your wife and to her father the doctor, but it will take time for the fire here to fade. We cannot hope to walk to England on live coals, can we, Monsieur?'

The words deep within him, words that had been seeking freedom, took their leave of him. 'I am not Charles Evrémonde,' he said at last.

In silence, the girl paused; for awhile she did not move but to watch him, as if hoping to unearth some telling secret from a thorough examination of his face. When it yielded nothing, she spoke again, her eyes even darker and more discerning than before.

'Then who are you?' she asked. 'And why in the name of God were you ready to die for him?'

'Sydney Carton,' he told her, executing a quick bow that led her to lift an arched eyebrow; 'an English barrister of little repute and littler worth.'

'Why give your life for Evrémonde?' she persisted, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes narrowed, her face emotionless.

'Because he has one,' Sydney Carton answered quietly, a hint of a small smile flickering across his face. 'There are a great many people in the world that care for him, and there are a great many people who would be deprived and destitute without him. No-one will be so affected in my absence; with the exception, perhaps, of the owners of the wine shops. They, I think, might deplore my passing, but they would be alone if they did.'

The girl considered him for a long moment, and Carton's evanescent smile disappeared again, as if it had never been. Upon discovering that he was not the precious marquis, would she eject him onto the street again, to be fed limb by limb to the Paris mob?

She moved again, not to cast him out, but to resume her search through the armoire at her left. From it she produced a tattered grey shirt, which she pressed into his hands as she stepped past him to the fireplace. There she knelt and collected a handful of ash. She returned, reached out, and rubbed it into Carton's hair without so much as a 'By your leave.'

When he blinked at her, consummately bewildered, she explained, 'You're to pretend that you're my aged father now, Monsieur Carton. I would use flour, if it weren't in such short supply.'

He wasn't sure whether to take affront as she finished and wiped her palms on his face, smearing ash onto his cheeks. On the one hand, this was ingenious; on the other, it was absolutely ludicrous.

When he caught a glimpse of himself, in ragged attire and quite literally ashen, in the cracked mirror by the door, he had to admit that the absurdity was serving its purpose. And when he saw over the reflection of his shoulder that Marie was in the process of scrounging the kitchen for something with which to feed him, he realised with a resurgence of awe that the girl searching the cupboards behind had, for no reason beyond some sort of altruism mostly lost in this era of bloodshed and destruction, saved his life, and that she was intent on preserving it even now, at the cost of her own thin resources.

As she returned with a few crusts and a little bit of watery wine, he felt it was almost his duty to say something to articulate his gratitude.

'I'm beginning to think that perhaps I did die today,' he remarked, 'and Saint Peter took pity on me.'

Thinly, the girl smiled. 'I'm afraid that there are no saints here, Monsieur,' she said.

_Except,_ Sydney thought, _for the Saint-Clares._


End file.
